There's been a big fuss about people who have been convicted of things overseas not being put onto the Police National Computer in a timely fashion. And the Sex Offenders Register. And something worries me about the almost inevitable media and Westminster village feeding frenzy on this.

I read a couple of weeks ago a story about a seventeen year old boy in Georgia, admittedly a US citizen but there's no telling who else it might happen to, who has been given a ten year prison term with no possibility of parole and a life time's entry on the US sex offenders register or its equivalent for being fellated by a fifteen year old girl at a party they were both at.

She pleasured several sixteen year old lads as well and it was all consensual, but the seventeen year old gets the book thrown at him as he's tried as an adult, or at least I think that's what made him different.

I presume that when the police get notice of these overseas criminal offenses that British citizens and residents have been convicted of they do actually check to see whether the offense would be an offense here and, if so, whether the punishment was proportionate. It seems to me that since they didn't even get the money to hire the staff to enter the data on the computer, they would hardly have had the resources to investigate each offense.

We are rightly proud of our justice system, or at least we used to be. I hope its relative fairness is not being compromised by simply accepting foreign courts' verdicts and punishments and registering them in the UK at face value on someone's record.